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Retail, nursing, and contact centers. What could these diverse occupations possibly have in common? Answer: they all rank among the highest in employee turnover rate. Unfortunately many of us know firsthand that when our contact center agents leave, their knowledge, experience, and time spent training them walks out the door. An inevitable consequence is that customer experience suffers.

How do you stem the tide?

Agent empowerment is an important key to reduce turnover and improve customer experience. When agents are allowed to make decisions themselves, their job frustrations diminish, and that boosts agent retention. Happier, more experienced agents means the customer experience skyrockets.

According to a recent ICMI article on culture, service leaders today “have a single common element of culture—empowerment. Empowerment means authorizing agents to resolve a customer’s issue, by whatever means necessary. Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom’s, Zappos, USAA— all these leaders have built their highly successful culture based on empowerment.”

As online retailer Zappos is often lauded for providing exemplary customer experience, I picked up the phone and called them to see what I could learn about agent empowerment. The agent I spoke with was Erica, who has been with Zappos for several years. She told me agents are encouraged to foster customer relationships, they are taught that every interaction is an opportunity to create a more loyal customer, and ultimately their goal is to create “wow” moments with customers.

And it works! At Zappos, agents are empowered to make decisions they think are best for customers rather than saying “let me put you on hold” while they track down a supervisor to seek approval. Agents are authorized to resolve problems – to send coupons, replacement products and, in one heart-warming instance Erica mentioned, sent flowers to a customer who was battling cancer. That example literally made me say “Wow!”

How do we foster agent empowerment?

Agents know customers want an effortless customer experience and a prompt resolution. But often they are hampered in delivering it. They may lack insight into what happened previously in the customer’s journey, be it months ago, or even in this single interaction. When agents work from an omnichannel desktop, they use the same interface to handle every type of interaction regardless of their nature or sources (direct calls, website, IVR, mobile application. etc.). This means they do not have to go into different applications to respond to emails, handle web chat, co-browse with the customer, and handle phone or video calls. When an agent uses the same desktop for every customer interaction, it will be easier for him or her to be more productive and deliver a great customer experience.

In addition, an omnichannel desktop can:

Provide agents with a knowledge base at their fingertips, a common response library with FAQ answers, all within the same interface, enabling them to immediately respond to customer inquiries.

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Genesys® powers 25 billion of the world’s best customer experiences each year. Our success comes from connecting employee and customer conversations on any channel, every day. Over 10,000 companies in 100+ countries trust our #1 customer experience platform to drive great business outcomes and create lasting relationships. Combining the best of technology and human ingenuity, we build solutions that mirror natural communication and work the way you think. Our industry-leading solutions foster true omnichannel engagement, performing equally well across all channels, on-premise and in the cloud. Experience communication as it should be: fluid, instinctive and profoundly empowering.